Dear SVIN Members,

As we step into a new year, it is an honor and a privilege to share with you what we have accomplished and opportunities ahead.

SVIN Annual Meeting 2024

First, thank you to those who attended and supported our 2024 SVIN Annual Meeting. Our meeting was highly successful thanks to your participation, the leadership of Dr. Alexandra Czap and the organizing committee, with a record 1386 attendees (1072 in-person, 314 virtual) and high-quality educational content. We highlighted late- breaking clinical study results, including the MEMBRANE randomized trial, primary results of RESCUE ICAS, the EXCELLENT Registry, the COMMAND pilot study, and intra-arterial stem cell delivery for stroke. For the first time, we introduced SVIN-SLICE workshops in North America, with great feedback from its faculty, attendees, and trainees. SVINnovation was another highlight where several entrepreneurs delivered their pitch to our judges who awarded the $100,000 US prize to Dr. Matthew Findlay of SoundPass for a novel external ventricular drain catheter.

Please do not hesitate to let us know if you have session ideas or feedback for this year’s 2025 SVIN meeting in Orlando, Florida, November 20-22, which will be led by Dr. Edgar Samaniego. We are especially interested in featuring clinical trial results or studies that may converge to this time.

Mission Thrombectomy

Mission Thrombectomy has had an incredible year. In 2023, SVIN was granted United Nations consultative status for stroke and mechanical thrombectomy advocacy. Dr. Fawaz Al-Mufti, chair of the Global Mission Thrombectomy initiative, has done an outstanding job representing SVIN at the World Health Organization Meeting in Geneva in May 2024, where we met with the Director-General of the WHO, Dr. Tedros Ghebreyesus, and directors from the WHO's Noncommunicable Diseases division. Dr. Al-Mufti also represented us at the United Nations this past September 2024 to advocate for stroke.

For the May Stroke Awareness month, we launched a campaign to educate on stroke symptoms and signs across many languages, thanks to an idea seeded and sprouted by Dr. Giana Dawod.

S:VIN Journal

Our open access SVIN journal hit a milestone this past year, now with an impact factor of 2.1. This is a fantastic achievement as our journal went live only in July 2021. With the high quality of manuscripts received and published, we expect the impact factor to grow. We were very happy to honor and extend gratitude to our editor-in-chief, Dr. Ashutosh Jadhav, with the SVIN Distinguished Service Award for his outstanding work with the launch of our journal, maintaining its high quality standards and content. We also extend our gratitude to the S:VIN Editors, Editorial Board and Digital Strategy Media Teams for their diligence in building our journal and its podcast. Our open access journal in collaboration with the AHA ensures that our readership has free access to every article. We encourage you to submit your manuscript to S:VIN. Members receive an article processing fee discount; early career members now have access to early career waiver; Wiley has global and institutional agreements that may significantly reduce or waive publishing fees.

Education

From an educational front, we have had a terrific streak of educational platforms via the ‘WebNIRs’ and Virtual Stroke Academy, led by Dr. Krishna Amuluru and Dr. Amanda Jagolino-Cole. A big thank you to our volunteers and our many speakers for delivering high-yield educational content for our membership. Over the next few months, we are rolling out brief practice updates and SVIN guidelines—you can be on the lookout for these in our S:VIN journal.

SVIN University, an educational and interactive event for our neurovascular industry colleagues will return this year April 3-5, 2025 at the Houston Airport Marriott. Thank you to Drs. Ameer Hassan, Mikayel Grigoryan, and Haralabos Zacharatos for leading this important initiative.

Women in Vascular and Interventional Neurology (WIN)

The WIN committee of SVIN has been incredibly active. Under the leadership of Drs. Cynthia Kenmuir, Robin Novakovic, and Preethi Ramchand, they have developed a mentorship program within SVIN, as well as a speaker registry to help connect meeting organizers with the right speaker(s).

Growing our Next Generation of SVIN Leaders

Last, we have built a dynamic community of volunteers and SVIN leaders dedicated to advancing the field of vascular and interventional neurosciences. I am proud to share with you that with the guidance of our SVIN board and SVIN committee leaders, every committee in SVIN now carries defined terms of leadership for the chair and vice-chair positions (typically 2 years). We have 9/30 leadership positions occupied by women. This rotation of leadership and emphasis on diversity ensures that we have the best people working together to lead their sections, that we grow the next generation of leaders, that we have new ideas, diverse perspectives, and energy coming to our organization at every rotation.

Looking Ahead

Looking ahead, we will continue to build on each of the above initiatives with your feedback. We are also excited to develop the SVIN-Stroke Interventional Lab Certification (SILC) initiative, in conjunction with Mission Thrombectomy. We acknowledge the importance of recognizing and advocating for SILC labs globally. We are in a beta phase, have begun accepting applications and will aim to go live later this year.

In closing, it has been a great pleasure to meet and work with you, our volunteers from our society, committee leaders, and the community at large. I wish to recognize and thank you, our SVIN volunteers and our committee leaders, who are our bedrock. You drive the many missions of our society forward. We hope to have your continued collaboration in 2025.

Here’s to a happy and healthy New Year.

Sincerely,

Thanh N. Nguyen MD, FSVIN
SVIN President